A Pragmatic and Categorical Analysis of a Sibling Dispute

Drawing on a combination of analytical tools from interactional pragmatics and membership categorisation analysis, this seminar explores a specific type of everyday family life – a sibling dispute – and how the 'parent' category is used as an interactional resource by parents and children during oppositional talk in shared interactions.

The data comes from spontaneous video-recorded conversations in a Russian-speaking family living in Australia that includes two sets of siblings, aged 2 and 10, and 5 and 7. The findings demonstrate how, through category labels, predicates and category-implicative social actions:

• children exploit the 'parent' category to mobilise support or denounce the other's reportable transgression
• parents intervene in the dispute and socialise children into sharing, gradually moving from suggestions and directives to a threat.

This study contributes to our understanding of how sibling disputes unfold and how siblings construct their relationships.

Date

Friday 12 September 2025

Time

1 to 2 pm

Location

Online via Zoom

Speaker

Dr Valeria Sinkeviciute
The University of Queensland